NYT: Facebook gave incomplete data to misinformation investigators
Facebook has given researchers incomplete information about how users interact with messages on the platform. The company is said to have provided data from half of its US users, while it said it was data from all of its users in the US.
Facebook has apologized to the researchers by email, The New York Times reported. In it, the platform would have apologized for ‘the inconvenience’ that the error may have caused. The company states that it is updating the datasets to fix the flaw, but that it would take several weeks before this work would be completed, given the large amount of data.
Company representatives also held a phone call with investigators on Friday to apologize for the error, anonymous sources reported. In it, several researchers allegedly complained that they lost months of work because of the mistake. An investigator is also said to have questioned whether Facebook was negligent, or whether the mistake was made intentionally to undermine investigations.
A company spokesperson claims the issue was caused by a “technical error,” and says Facebook has “proactively” reported the issue to its partners. The error was discovered by Fabio Giglietto, a professor from the University of Urbino in Italy. Giglietto compared the data the company provided to researchers with data from the transparency report that Facebook published in August. He discovered that the data did not match.
In recent months, Facebook has become more controversial about sharing information. The New York Times recently found out that the company had withheld a transparency report, after which Facebook published it.
In early August, Facebook also banned some academics who were investigating the distribution of political ads on the platform. The researchers used a self-developed browser extension, instead of the data provided by Facebook itself. Facebook stated that those researchers “unauthorized” scrape data from the platform. AlgorithmWatch also dropped its investigation into the Instagram algorithm last month after parent company Facebook threatened legal action.